One family’s story about SIDS loss
By Dana Horn
Special to the Surveyor
June 24, 2009, started as most any other day would have. I woke up and fed our 2 ½-month-old son Joshua, and then laid him back down to sleep.
I got ready for work and came back into our room to say goodbye to my husband and our baby. My husband sat up and we exchanged goodbyes and then looked over at Joshua and I knew something was wrong instantly. I could only see his legs from my angle, but they were mottled and discolored. My husband rushed and picked him up and he was limp, lifeless. I remember a feeling of disbelief and disconnection wash over me; this surely was a nightmare, this could not be happening. My husband rushed him over to the dresser and began infant CPR. We learned how by watching the video at the hospital and we are so grateful we paid attention to it. I called 911 and begged them to come as fast as possible, my baby was not breathing, and he had no pulse. We continued CPR until the EMTs arrived and took over. My husband and I sat in the living room while an investigator questioned us about the morning. Our minds were reeling, how did this happen? What happened? How could our healthy baby just die in his sleep? It’s a question that still haunts us nine years later, but we do have a name for the monster that stole our son – SIDS. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is what we were told after the autopsy had been completed. Our son was healthy and vibrant with every promise of a long future until the unexpected came. We were told there was nothing we could have done and that it’s a mystery that claims the lives of over 2500 babies, in the U.S. alone, every year. I had two children before Joshua and had never heard of SIDS. How was that possible?
I became very driven to want to educate everyone I possibly could about SIDS through any avenue that would let me. I wrote our local paper, I went on the radio to share risk-reduction steps, and I even went to the high school to the family education classes and taught teens about it.
There are some risk-reduction steps that can be taken to reduce the chances of SIDS occurring. Remember, risk reduction and prevention are not the same. It has been learned SIDS is very likely linked to serotonin levels in the brain. Serotonin regulates mood and various things in adults, but in an infant, serotonin regulates heart rate and breathing when asleep. It essentially takes over what the brain does when awake. It has been discovered, in infants lost to SIDS, they either had low serotonin or improper receptors to process it. There is no way to test to know which babies have serotonin deficiencies, as it is in the brain, so the only thing we can do is to give every baby the same recommendations for safe sleep. It is not known what triggers a SIDS event, but surroundings are believed to be a very big factor, hence, risk reduction by limiting the number of outside factors.
Although I cannot bring my son back, my hope is that somehow someone will read our story and take something away from it that might, unknowingly, save their baby from the same fate as ours.
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